PHOTOS of women posing sexily as nuns have caused outrage among religious groups in Spain. Obscenity, an exhibition of 50 provocative images, includes Spanish actress Rossy de Palma in a black and white habit and see-through corset with a rosary between her teeth. Other images include Alaska, a well known singer in Spain, dressed as a sexy saint in black with a communion wafer on her tongue. The controversial show, at the Fresh Gallery in Madrid, has led to calls from Catholic groups including the Eucharistic Ministry for demonstrations ‘against blasphemy’. The organisation said the protest would be held ‘in defence of our Christian roots and the Catholic faith’. The Francisco Franco Foundation, a group created to preserve the memory of the former dictator, called the exhibition ‘a virulent and morbid attack on the Catholic religion’. Meanwhile conservative campaign group, Make Yourself Heard, wrote on its website that ‘blasphemous provocation threatens again’. However the exhibition’s creator, controversial Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce, defended the show. “The lives of the saints are full of ecstatic acts of sublimated sexuality,” he said. “Obscenity presents a series of portraits that illustrate this most holy convergence of the sacred and the profane.”
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Catholics and conservatives have denounced as blasphemous two recent exhibitions in Madrid featuring kinky nuns in lingerie and tattooed and near-naked Christs, demonstrating outside one gallery. Catholic group AES called a demonstration for Friday evening outside the Fresh Gallery in Madrid against its latest exhibition: "Obscenity", a collection of photographs by Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce. The 50 pictures on display include a portrait of Spanish actress Rossy de Palma in a black and white habit and see-through corset with a rosary between her teeth. One shows a well-known singer, Alaska, dressed as a sexy saint with a communion wafer on her tongue, while in another she hugs a tattooed Christ to her breast in a kinky tribute to Michaelangelo's Pieta sculpture. Around 50 protesters demonstrated outside the Fresh gallery Friday evening bearing placards reading "For a unified and Catholic Spain" and "God Exists". LaBruce himself was unrepentant. "How can fascists attempt to assert any sort of moral authority over anything?" he said. LaBruce, 48, whose work has often sparked protests and censorship, wrote on the gallery's website that "the lives of the saints are full of ecstatic acts of sublimated sexuality."
Spain's royal family has long enjoyed a level of privacy and respect that the Windsors could only dream of. But, in an uncomfortable first for the Madrid monarchy, one of their number will face questioning from a judge this week in a scandal which has rocked the royal family and raised questions over the future of the monarchy. Inaki Urdangarin, the son-in-law of King Juan Carlos, is preparing for a court appearance in which he will defend himself in a widening embezzlement scandal. Hearings into the case began last weekend at a court in Palma on the Balearic island of Majorca and will culminate on Saturday with the long anticipated appearance of the Duke of Palma, who received the title when he married Cristina, the King's youngest daughter, in 1997. The Duke, 44, a former professional handball player who won Olympic medals for Spain in the sport, was formally made a suspect in the wide-ranging fraud case that alleges the embezzlement of millions of euros of government funds through a non-profit organization he co-directed between 2004 and 2006. Investigators claim to have discovered a "black hole" in the accounts of the Noos Institute, which organised sporting and tourism events for the regional governments of the Balearic Islands and Valencia.
Morocco has banned the distribution of Thursday’s edition of Spain’s influential El Pais, as a cartoon published by the newspaper allegedly tarnished King Mohammed VI’s name, an official said. “The decision to ban (the paper) was made on the basis of article 29 of the press code” that protects the monarch, the senior communication ministry official told AFP on Saturday. “The caricature contains a deliberate intention to smear the (king’s) image to harm the king personally,” he added. The cartoon, which was picked up by a Moroccan website, accompanied an article by Spanish journalist Ignacio Cembrero, who knows Morocco well. Contacted by AFP, Cembrero said the Moroccan reaction surprised him as the small cartoon was “friendly and rather likeable”. It seemed to be the first time that a foreign publication was banned for the stated reasons since the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) came to power in Morocco in January, he added. So far Morocco has only banned weeklies that carried images of the Prophet Mohammed, or of God, which is forbidden under Muslim tradition. Earlier this month French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur fell into that category after printing an image of God. And last month the magazine was banned when a cover story on the Arab world included the supposed face of the Prophet Mohammed. Morocco also banned French weekly l’Express in January for publishing a 95-page dossier on Islam including a face meant to represent Mohammed’s.
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Whitney Houston was found dead today in a Beverly Hills hotel room, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. Paramedics arriving at the Beverly Hilton found the singer's body. While the cause of death is still unknown, Houston's publicist Kristen Foster has confirmed the sad news. Houston had been scheduled to attend the annual pre-Grammy party of music mogul Clive Davis, the producer who discovered her, tonight and had attended rehearsals for the event earlier this week. CNN reports the party is still going on. The singer, was known for her string of hits in the Eighties and Nineties, including "The Greatest Love of All," "I Will Always Love You," "How Will I Know" and "I'm Every Woman." She also had an acting career, appearing in The Bodyguard and Waiting to Exhale. In recent years, Houston was more known for her tumultous personal life and addiction issues. She was married to R&B singer Bobby Brown from 1992 to 2007, and had the couple had one daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, born in 1993. The couple appeared in the reality TV series Being Bobby Brown in 2005. |
Saturday, 11 February 2012
Troubled actress Demi Moore, who was recently hospitalized after reportedly suffered from a drug-induced meltdown, is seeking spiritual help from friend and guru Deepak Chopra. The 49-year-old had decided to end her 6-year marriage to husband Ashton Kutcher in November last year due to his infidelity. A source told People that she is seeking advice from Chopra, who has authored more than 64 books about spirituality and healing, the New York Daily News reported.
Friday, 10 February 2012
The pair had a discreet romantic affair that began in 1995 and ended a few months before her death in August 1997.
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Caught in Flight is described as "a compelling portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales during the last two years of her life".
Watts, 43, said it was "such an honour to be able to play this iconic role".
"Princess Diana was loved across the world, and I look forward to rising to the challenge of playing her on screen," she continued.
Hirschbiegel, who previously dramatised Hitler's final days in 2004 film Downfall, described Watts as "a truly exceptional actress who embodies the warmth, humanity and empathy of such a global icon".
Earlier reports had linked US actress Jessica Chastain to her part in the film, to be based on a screenplay by British playwright Stephen Jeffreys.
Watts, whose films include the remakes of King Kong, The Ring and Funny Games, received an Oscar nomination for her work in 21 Grams and was recently seen alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in J Edgar.
Produced by Ecosse Films, whose previous features include John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, the movie will begin shooting in the UK later this year.
- The Observer, Sunday 22 January 2012
- Article history
Take me there: yoga in Marbella
Marbella may not seem an obvious destination to go in search of enlightenment and the ancient healing therapies of the Far East, but a new health resort is bringing a flavour of Bali to Spain – without the jetlag. Just a 40-minute drive from the Costa del Sol, Shanti-Som takes its inspiration from Asian destination spas with Buddha statues, tropical gardens, Asian-Med fusion cuisine, eastern therapies and a programme of detox, meditation and yoga. Destination Yoga ( 0845 458 0723 ,destinationyoga.co.uk) will be running a retreat here in March. A seven-night yoga retreat from £945, excluding flights, departs 18 March.
On the face of things, it looks like a happy family snap.
King Juan Carlos of Spain sits with the small Prince William, while a radiant Princess Diana, a protective arm round toddler Prince Harry, leans in to share a pleasantry with the good-looking monarch.
But look again. At the other end of the couch, Prince Charles seems scarcely part of the same holiday party in 1986. He is staring glumly straight ahead like the proverbial gooseberry.
Princess Diana is rumoured to be just one of the many young ladies the king, now 74, pursued in a romantic career in which — like his namesake, the seducer Don Juan — he is said to have bedded more than 1,500 women.
Distant: Prince Charles stares into the distance in this 1986 photograph showing him, Diana and the young Princes William and Harry with Queen Sofia and King Carlos of Spain
The explosive claim is made in a new book by Barcelona-based author Pilar Eyre, who has already written six volumes about the Spanish royal family.
Imperious and suave, Juan Carlos looks every inch the old-style monarch . . . with the autocratic manners to go with it. He loves hunting bears, skiing and boating — and bedding the opposite sex.
Apparently, it is an open secret in his circles that he is such a keen womaniser that the only woman he does not spend much time with is his wife, Greek-born Queen Sofia. According to Eyre, the two have not shared a bed for 35 years.
In fact, the book says, following an operation on a benign lung tumour at a Barcelona hospital in 2010, the woman who spent most of the time consoling him during his convalescence was a 25-year-old German interpreter called Corinne.
Another shot of the princess during the 1986 holiday. She allegedly told her bodyguard that the king fancied her
But can it really be true that our very own Princess Diana was one of Juan Carlos’s most significant conquests? And that it was the relationship between her and the then 48-year-old king, in the prime of his romantic life, that finally put paid to any chance of reviving his marriage?
It is certainly the case that the Princess, together with Prince Charles and their young children, holidayed in Majorca with the Spanish royal family several times during the Eighties.
Charles never felt at ease on the sunshine island and much preferred visiting the Duke of Wellington’s estate near Granada on the mainland where the shooting was good.
But Diana, who loved lounging about on yachts in stylish bathing suits, was right at home on the shores of the Mediterranean where she could show off her figure. And the king, who appreciated displays of female beauty, seems to have acted on an impulse to get closer to her.
After her first trip to Majorca in 1986, Eyre alleges Diana told her bodyguard Ken Wharfe that Juan Carlos fancied her. Apparently, the king made all sorts of excuses to get tactile with her and used to love bending down with her and inviting her to stroke his old German shepherd dog, Archie.
Another royal biographer, Lady Colin Campbell, has long insisted that the Princess and the king embarked on an affair while on a cruise with their spouses in August 1986, and that they took up with each other again the following summer.
‘Diana did it to make Charles jealous, but it didn’t work,’ says Lady Colin. ‘Charles couldn’t have cared less.’
According to Eyre, rumours of the affair intensified later over the curious case of some photos of Diana in a state of undress. These were touted around the world’s publications, only to be taken off the market when someone in Spain paid $45,000 (£29,000) for them. That someone is rumoured to have been Juan Carlos, who wanted to protect the Princess’s reputation.
But why rake all this up now? Diana is long since dead, while Juan Carlos, though he retains an eye for a pretty woman, has made it quite plain that he would never divorce his wife, with whom he has three children and eight grandchildren.
Eyre says she has revealed it for Queen Sofia’s sake. ‘In a macho country like Spain, the king’s womanising image makes him very popular,’ she says. ‘Even the women don’t reproach him. On the contrary, they love him because he has such a seductive manner with them. But they don’t feel the same about poor Queen Sofia.
Loveable rogue: Barcelona-based author Pilar Eyre claims that in macho Spain, the King's womanising makes him very popular
‘She is seen as a cold, aloof foreigner. I wanted to show what she has had to put up with.’
Eyre says she tried hard to find out whether the Queen might also have had lovers in her time, but could come up with nothing. Though as a young woman she had caught the eye of the Duke of Kent — first cousin to our Queen — the Duke then fell in love with the Englishwoman he married, Kathleen Worsley.
Sofia dutifully entered into an arranged marriage in 1962, having met the highly eligible Juan Carlos on a cruise specially convened to introduce Europe’s young royals to each other.
By 1968, they had produced two daughters and Crown Prince Felipe. But though Sofia had fallen deeply in love with her husband, Eyre says Juan Carlos was still playing the field.
And by 1975, when he finally came to the Spanish throne after the death of the dictator General Franco, the new Queen was nursing a great sadness. For by then the royal couple were more or less estranged as a result of the king’s persistent womanising.
According to the book, one of Sofia’s greatest humiliations happened a couple of months after Juan Carlos became king. All of a sudden he sent for a new barber and underwent such a transformation Sofia was convinced he was sprucing himself up for a lover.
Notorious womaniser: The king is rumoured not to have shared a bed with his wife for 35 years
A few days later he packed his suitcase and said he was going hunting near Toledo. ‘It’s an all-male outing; you’d be bored,’ he told his wife. Unwisely, she decided to surprise him by arriving at the estate in the middle of the night with their children, the eldest of whom was 12.
She burst through the door, brushed past the servants and, taking the stairs two at a time, discovered her husband in flagrante with an unknown woman. But even being caught by his entire family did not encourage the king to mend his ways.
Eyre says that throughout her reign, Sofia has consequently been forced to content herself with a life of duty in Madrid, leavened by shopping trips with her daughters and occasional visits to England to visit her brother Constantine, the ex-King of Greece, who has lived in London since he was booted off the throne in 1973.
Lately she has taken solace in religion. She goes to Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday in the palace and attends Madrid’s Greek Orthodox church as well. Her devotions seem to annoy Juan Carlos even more.
The king raised his voice to his mother-in-law, Queen Federica of Greece, when he heard her telling her daughter how the Virgin Mary had appeared before her in a vision in a church near Madrid.
‘There was an intense light and peace!’ said Federica, at which point the king shouted: ‘Shut up, you! Don’t fill her head with this nonsense, she will believe it all.’
The tragedy is that despite his behaviour, the Queen appears to be as captivated by her husband as she was when they married 40 years ago.
At a recent family funeral she was seen holding tight to him and sobbing on his shoulder as if they were still the closest of companions.
Whether the book will rehabilitate Sofia in the eyes of the Spaniards or merely add to the prestige of Juan Carlos remains to be seen.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
“If I’m not there playing, I’ll be there as an ambassador or as a fan, so, of course I’ll be here. I mean, it’s the East End of London.
“Of course there are going to be benefits, of course it’s also costing a fortune, but there will be benefits and you won’t see those straight away, you’ll see them in years to come."
Thank God 'designer stubble' has meant that I can put off shaving for as long as I possibly can. I know I'm not alone in this – skin irritation, time and impatience are all factors which make shaving a dreaded ritual for the modern man. There does exist, however, if not an antidote, then at least an alternative – the traditional wet shave. In fact, going to your barbers for the hot towel treatment and a bit of 'me' time is becoming ever more popular, and with our capital being a city famous for grooming traditions I've taken it upon myself to explore some of London's finest barbers.
Liam Bailey, the head of residential research for Knight Frank, showed a positive prediction for this year, looking at the last figures. “As 2012 begins, our view is that the prime central London market will see slower but still positive price growth”, he said in the report.
Figures were positive in terms of new buyers’ applicant volumes, which grew by 10 per cent in last year, compared with the volumes of new homes for sale, which rose by 6 per cent. In this sense, the ratio between the number of buyers registering to purchase homes in Central London and the available offers had risen to hit 4.1 in the past three months. Knight Frank considers that the £5 million plus range, where applications were higher by 65 per cent year-on-year, was the moment with a higher imbalance between offer and demand.
Mr. Bailey pointed out that “the Eurozone crisis, which appeared to reach something of a crescendo in the pre-Christmas period, had little impact on the prime London property market. Ironically, economic and even political turmoil have provided the impetus for growth, with a sharp growth in investors looking for a safe-haven location for at least part of their wealth portfolio”.
In addition, there has been an increase of interest in property purchases from abroad. In a survey carried out by the residential agent between several estate agents, “there was a consensus that buyers from Russia and the former CIS states would become even more important to the London marketplace. Demand from Chinese nationals, which was negligible until 2010 was expected to continue its recent rapid growth, followed by Indian and Middle Eastern demand”, Mr. Bailey added.
According to the report, European buyers have also put their eyes on the central London property market, who describe the importance, value and privacy in an urban environment as the main factors taken in account when they buy a house. In terms of market, “one of the UK’s real attractions for international investors and residents has always been its reputation [London property market] for stability in legal, political and tax affairs”, Mr. Bailey commented.
Police sources said the body of the victim was found on the N-340 at 1.20am today, near the cambio de sentido at Cabopino, after a call to the police from a hotel worker reporting that a man had been injured and was bleeding badly.
National and local police and health workers rushed to the scene but could do nothing to save the victim’s life. The police say the victim and the two other men were arguing in an establishment, and then continued their discussion in the street.
The police continue to investigate and are still to identify the other two men involved.
The Junta de Andalucía has said that cork oaks, pines and shrub were all affected and the UME, Military Emergency Unit was called into assist INFOCA.
The strong winds in the area, upto 40kms/hour on Saturday, complicated the control of the fire, and the fire-fighters continued their work on Saturday night despite temperatures of -4ºC.
More than 240 people took part in fighting the fire, using four helicopters and five amphibious planes. There were no injuries and nobody had to be moved from their homes.
Marbella trumpeter Jose Collado, 62, claims to be the son of Jose Antonio Larios Franco the fourth Marquis de Larios, whose father founded the famous Larios gin brand in the 20s.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
But last night dynamic duo Beckham and Prince Harry were forced to their cancel boys night to rub shoulders with a stunning Katerine Jenkins.
All three were out on the town partying at the Arts Club in Mayfair and despite the snow warnings the trio stayed in the London venue until after 3am, walking out in the freezing cold.
Looking dapper: David Beckham parties rubs shoulders with Katherine Jenkins, a known family friend
Father-of-four Beckham looked dapper in a dark suit, white shirt and gold tie while singer Jenkins, 31, opted for classical chic in a simple strapless dress with black jacket.
Friday, 3 February 2012
Nearly half of all Spaniards (45%) claim to “be addicted” to the internet, amongst them, the majority are women and youngsters between 18 and 34. The figures come from the “Nestea Study about the Internet and Social Networks”, carried out by the Sondea Institute. 2,618 people were interviewed throughout Spain. According to the study, the autonomous communities with the most “addicted” to the internet are people living in Navarra (65%), Balearic Islands (58%), Cantabria and the Basque country (both 50%). The least “addicted” are in Asturias (35%), Galicia (36%), La Rioja (38%), and Murcia (41%). The study reveals that 43% of all Spaniards spend between four and ten hours per day, actively connected to the internet, while 5% are connected more than ten hours per day. Over 90% of those who took part in the survey confirmed that they had a profile on a social networking site, mainly Facebook (85%), Twitter (35%), Tuenti (27%), and LinkedIn (17%).
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Snoop Dogg launched an foul-mouthed attack on Kim Kardashian in a new web video. The 40-year-old rapper, who uses his Nemo pseudonym in the clip, calls the 31-year-old 'cold blooded' and uses a series of misogynist terms to describe her. In the video, which is running on the Hollywood Reporter, he claims to be giving 'advice' to her ex husband Kris Humphries, telling him he’s just one of many men who have be burnt by the reality TV star.